Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition - Softcover

Rubini, Alessandro; Corbet, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596000081 ISBN 13: 9780596000080

Publisher: O'Reilly, 2001

Synopsis

This book is for anyone who wants to support computer peripherals under the Linux operating system or who wants to develop new hardware and run it under Linux. Linux is the fastest-growing segment of the Unix market, is winning over enthusiastic adherents in many application areas, and is being viewed more and more as a good platform for embedded systems. Linux Device Drivers, already a classic in its second edition, reveals information that heretofore has been shared by word of mouth or in cryptic source code comments, on how to write drivers for a wide range of devices.Version 2.4 of the Linux kernel includes significant changes to device drivers, simplifying many activities, but providing subtle new features that can make a driver both more efficient and more flexible. The second edition of this book thoroughly covers these changes, as well as new processors and buses.You don't have to be a kernel hacker to understand and enjoy this book; all you need is an understanding of C and some background in Unix system calls. You'll learn how to write drivers for character devices, block devices, and network interfaces, guided by full-featured examples that you can compile and run without special hardware. Major changes in the second edition include discussions of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and locking, new CPUs, and recently supported buses. For those who are curious about how an operating system does its job, this book provides insights into address spaces, asynchronous events, and I/O.Portability is a major concern in the text. The book is centered on version 2.4, but includes information for kernels back to 2.0 where feasible. Linux Device Driver also shows how to maximize portability among hardware platforms; examples were tested on IA32 (PC) and IA64, PowerPC, SPARC and SPARC64, Alpha, ARM, and MIPS.Contents include:

• Building a driver and loading modules
• Complete character, block, and network drivers
• Debugging a driver
• Timing
• Handling symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems
• Memory management and DMA
• Interrupts
• Portability issues
• Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)

About this title

Review

Updated to cover version 2.4.x of the Linux kernel, the second edition of Linux Device Drivers remains the best general-purpose, paper-bound guide for programmers wishing to make hardware devices work under the world's most popular open-source operating system. The authors take care to show how to write drivers that are portable--that is, that compile and run under all popular Linux platforms. That, along with the fact that they're careful to explain and illustrate concepts, makes this book very well suited to any programmer familiar with C but not with the hardware-software interface. It's worth noting that the emphasis in the title is on "device drivers" as much as "Linux." This book will make sense to you if you've never written a driver for any platform before. It helps if you have some Linux or Unix background, but even that is secondary as a prerequisite to C skill.

For a programming text--and one concerned with low-level instructions and data structures, at that--this book is remarkably rich in prose. You'll typically want to read this book straight through, more or less skipping the code samples, before sketching out your plan for the driver you need to write. Then, go back and pay closer attention to the sections on specific details you need to implement, like custom task queues. For coding-time details about specific system calls and programming techniques, count on the index to point you to the right passages. --David Wall

Topics covered: Techniques for writing hardware device drivers that run under Linux kernels 2.0.x through 2.2.x. Sections show how to manage memory, time, interrupts, ports, and other details of the hardware-software interface.

About the Author

Jonathan Corbet got his first look at the BSD Unix source back in 1981, when an instructor at the University of Colorado let him "fix" the paging algorithm. He has been digging around inside every system he could get his hands on ever since, working on drivers for VAX, Sun, Ardent, and x86 systems on the way. He got his first Linux system in 1993, and has never looked back. Mr. Corbet is the co-founder and executive editor of Linux Weekly News; he lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and two children.

Alessandro Rubini installed Linux 0.99.14 soon after getting his degree as an electronic engineer. He then received a Ph.D in computer science at the University of Pavia despite his aversion toward modern technology. Alas, he still enjoys digging in technology and discovering the intelligence of people who created it: that's why he now works in his apartment with three PCs, an Alpha, a SPARC, and an Apple2 -- the last without Linux. But you might find him roaming around in the north of Italy on his bike, which doesn't carry an electronic cyclometer.

Edition details

• Publisher: O'Reilly
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0596000081
• ISBN 13: 9780596000080
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 592